Christian Lüth, sacked from the far-right AfD party last week, was accused of seriously assaulting a woman earlier this year, a German newspaper has reported.
Image: Michael Sohn/AP/picture-alliance
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The disgraced former spokesman for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) Christian Lüth seriously assaulted a woman earlier this year, according to charges pressed against him and seen by the Welt am Sonntag newspaper.
The Berlin state prosecutor confirmed to the paper that the charges had been filed in June.
Several leading members of the AfD confirmed that were aware of the accusations as early as March, when party chairman Tino Chrupalla reportedly met with the alleged victim, after which he informed members of the parliamentary group.
A spokesman for parliamentary co-leader Alice Weidel also confirmed that she had been aware of the accusations for months, the paper said.
In a statement, Lüth denied he was an extremist and said he had used an "ironic, exaggerated" choice of words. He has not yet publicly addressed the new claims.
Lüth had already been removed from his post as parliamentary press spokesman in April after describing himself as a "fascist" in a chat group.
One high-ranking figure in the AfD, Uwe Junge, parliamentary leader in Rhineland-Palatinate, has called for the resignation of Weidel and co-leader Alexander Gauland over the affair, saying the party was suffering serious reputational damage under their leadership and faced electoral losses.
Ex-AfD spokesman said migrants could be 'gassed': Journalist Thilo Mischke speaks to DW
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The ongoing internal turmoil does seem to be having an effect on the popularity of the far-right party, the most successful nationalist party in Germany since World War II.
A new opinion poll published on Sunday showed that it had slipped from first to third place in its strongholds in the eastern German states.
Whereas this time last year the AfD was polling at 24% in the eastern German states, it is now only reaching 18%, according to a poll published in the Bild am Sonntag newspaper.
AfD leaders and their most offensive remarks
Leading members of the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) party have often made provocative, if not outright offensive, remarks — targeting refugees or evoking Nazi terminology.
Image: Britta Pedersen/dpa/picture alliance
Björn Höcke
The head of the AfD in the state of Thuringia first made headlines in 2017 for referring to Berlin's Holocaust memorial as a "monument of shame" and calling on the country to stop atoning for its Nazi past. In July 2023, he echoed Nazi rhetoric by declaring that "This EU must die so that the true Europe may live." In 2019, a court ruled that it was not slanderous to describe Höcke as a fascist.
Image: picture-alliance/Arifoto Ug/Candy Welz
Alice Weidel
One of the best-known public faces of the AfD, party co-chair Alice Weidel rarely shies away from causing a row. Her belligerent rhetoric caused particular controversy in a Bundestag speech in 2018, when she declared, "burqas, headscarf girls, publicly-supported knife men, and other good-for-nothings will not secure our prosperity, economic growth, and the social state."
Image: Sebastian Kahnert/dpa/picture-alliance
Maximilian Krah
Maximilian Krah, the AfD's top candidate in the 2024 European Parliament election, has called the EU a "vassal" of the US and wants to replace it with a "confederacy of fatherlands." He also wants to end support for Ukraine, and has warned on Twitter that immigration will lead to an "Umvolkung" of the German people — a Nazi-era term similar to the far-right's "great replacement" conspiracy theory.
Image: Ronny Hartmann/AFP/Getty Images
Alexander Gauland
Former parliamentary party leader Gauland was roundly criticized for a speech he made to the AfD's youth wing in June 2018. He said Germany had a "glorious history and one that lasted a lot longer than those damned 12 years. Hitler and the Nazis are just a speck of bird shit in over 1,000 years of successful German history."
Christian Lüth
Ex-press officer Christian Lüth had already faced demotion for past contentious comments before being caught on camera talking to a right-wing YouTube video blogger. "The worse things get for Germany, the better they are for the AfD," Lüth allegedly said, before turning his focus to migrants. "We can always shoot them later, that's not an issue. Or gas them, as you wish. It doesn't matter to me."
Image: Soeren Stache/dpa/picture-alliance
Beatrix von Storch
Initially, the AfD campaigned against the euro and bailouts — but that quickly turned into anti-immigrant rhetoric. "People who won't accept STOP at our borders are attackers," the European lawmaker said in 2016. "And we have to defend ourselves against attackers," she said — even if this meant shooting at women and children.
Image: picture-alliance/dpa/M. Murat
Harald Weyel
Not all of the AfD's scandals are about racism: Sometimes they are just revealing. Bundestag member Harald Weyel was caught in a scandal in September 2022 when a microphone he clearly didn't know was on caught him expressing his hope that Germany would suffer a "dramatic winter" of high energy prices or else "things will just go on as ever."
Image: Christoph Hardt /Future Image/imago images
Andre Poggenburg
Poggenburg, former head of the AfD in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt, has also raised eyebrows with extreme remarks. In February 2017, he urged other lawmakers in the state parliament to join measures against the extreme left-wing in order to "get rid of, once and for all, this rank growth on the German racial corpus" — the latter term clearly derived from Nazi terminology.
